Is a vegetable garden for you? Gardening of any kind must be entered into with a commitment of time, energy, and skills. A lack of any one or more of these elements may cause the gardening effort to result in sheer disappointment. Gardening requires a full season of enthusiasm.

Site Selection

Your garden should be near the house if possible. Many farm and country gardens are in one unit, but it often is more convenient to have a small kitchen garden near the house, with a larger garden out in the field for crops that are to be stored or preserved. The land should be fairly level and well drained, with no soil pockets where water might stand or where frosts might strike. In windy regions, shelterbelts, shrub borders, or buildings should protect gardens, but these shelters should not shade them.

Draw Your Plan

Put your plan on paper. Draw it to an appropriate scale, showing the size of the garden, spacing between rows, crops and varieties to be planted, dates of planting, length of row of each crop, spacing of transplanted crops in the row, succession plantings, and general arrangement of the crops. Make all rows straight and parallel.

The size of the garden depends on a number of variables, such as the size of your family, what you want to grow, and whether it is just a table garden or if you wish to process foods and store them. The time and effort factor also will limit the size in terms of what can be cared for satisfactorily.

Some Planning Tips

v Put perennial vegetables like asparagus and rhubarb along with small fruits on one side of the garden where they will not interfere with garden preparation.

v Group the crops according to the time they mature to facilitate succession plantings, rotation, or planting of green manure crops after harvest of the early crop.

v Vine crops such as melons, squash, and cucumbers can be planted on one side so they can spread into the fencerow.

v To insure good poll nation of sweet corn, plant several short parallel rows in blocks rather than one long single row.

v Do not crowd the plants; allow ample room for each vegetable to develop properly.

v Do not plant too much of crops such as chard, leaf lettuce, and parsley.

v Do not plant vegetables that are disliked by the family.

Soil Needs Nutrients, Too

In addition to organic matter and proper acidity, the soil should contain plenty of readily available nutrients. These are best supplied by liberal applications of manure and super phosphate or commercial fertilizers. This can be applied at the rate of three pounds per one hundred square feet at the time the garden is prepared in the spring.

Handy Garden Tools

You need only a few tools to do a good job of gardening: spade or fork-for preparing the soil in a small, unplowed garden; rake-for smoothing the soil, covering seeds, clean-up; hoe-for breaking up clods, loosening the soil, opening trenches, covering seeds; planting line or chalk line-for marking rows; measuring tape or yardstick-for spacing rows; trowel-for making holes in which to set plants; putty knife-for removing plants from flats.